We Knew It Well

The Chelsea Hotel may be the only Manhattan lodging space famous for its grit rather than its glamour. Even as only a few of the establishment’s neon letters are lit at night, it remains a solid New York City tourist attraction, drawing all those curious about the infamous Nancy Spungen murder or their favorite Leonard Cohen lyric. Today, few tenants from that raucous era remain, and the hotel is now being renovated into an artist-friendly luxury hotel. As an accompaniment to Nathaniel Rich’s oral history of the Chelsea, we bid farewell to the former Chelsea with a photographic tour inside its storied hallways.

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From the outside, Chelsea Hotel looks as if it were the only building in New York that was flown in from New Orleans.

Milos Forman (director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) remembers living on the eighth floor when the fire alarm went off one night and all of the tenants flocked to the stairwell to see what was going on: “The firemen had started to blast an incredibly powerful water cannon through the door of an apartment to extinguish the fire. From above we saw water running down the stairwell through the different floors, like a cascade. It was like Niagara Falls . . . a bottle of wine was passed around, and some joints, and everyone drank, smoked, talked, and watched the waterfall.”

Also inside #205. “People do their best work here,” says Artie Nash, one of the last tenants to receive a lease from the previous manager, Stanley Bard. “But the spirit of the place, what inspired people to live here, has been drained.”

The hallway of the 10th floor. “You could go to one floor and talk about theater with Stefan Brecht,” remembers former resident Scott Griffin, “and go to another floor and talk to Arnold Weinstein about poetry and then have dinner downstairs with Arthur Miller. There aren’t many buildings in New York like that.”

Artist Philip Taaffe and Gretchen Carlson with their children in their apartment, #920. “It’s one of the few apartments that wasn’t chopped up into little pieces when the hotel became a flophouse in the Depression,” says Carlson.

Another shot from inside #920, which was once composer Virgil Thomson’s apartment. Carlson and Taaffe moved in after Thomson’s death in 1989. Carlson said, “Virgil is still present in this place. Like a benign, gentle ghost. He died right here.”

The third-floor hallway in all of its unadorned glory, awaiting renovation. R. Crumb, a frequent guest at the hotel, said it was getting too expensive for him to stay there: “Manhattan is going to keep pushing in that direction, more and more expensive condos, apartments, hotel rooms. Then again, it’s always the end of some era in New York.”